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A flaw in the Sunday plan:
I spent the day reading a collection of beautiful, emotional eulogies to Stead written by his many journalist and other writing-professional friends and colleagues. This means that I also spent the majority of the day sitting in a public space a) trying not to cry, and b) trying not to let anyone see that I am crying.
I fail at maintaining a stiff upper lip. The air conditioning was worth a little public weeping, though.
The eulogies were really quite evocative. All of them, even those written by the people who had openly opposed Stead's politics and opinions in life, remarked on what a wonderful man he was, passionate in his defence of what he considered to be right and equally fervent in his persecution of what he considered to be wrong. His sister contributed an excerpt from the last letter he wrote her, just before he got on the Titanic. One man wrote that Stead died just as he would have wanted to -- helping people (into lifeboats, in this case), with his boots on, and at the ideologically-appropriate midway point between Britain and America.
With the last, the gentleman was being a little free with the truth, as the Titanic sank significantly closer to North American shores than to her British moorings. But the sentiment is quite nice and blatant artistic licence is perhaps the most appropriate of all possible tributes to Stead, anyway.
In order to break things up a little, in between Stead eulogies,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mcee taught me how to play gin, which I had never learned to play before and which, it turns out, I enjoy a great deal. We proved to have two kinds of gin -- slow gin and sudden-death gin. We have no medium speed gin.
I spent the day reading a collection of beautiful, emotional eulogies to Stead written by his many journalist and other writing-professional friends and colleagues. This means that I also spent the majority of the day sitting in a public space a) trying not to cry, and b) trying not to let anyone see that I am crying.
I fail at maintaining a stiff upper lip. The air conditioning was worth a little public weeping, though.
The eulogies were really quite evocative. All of them, even those written by the people who had openly opposed Stead's politics and opinions in life, remarked on what a wonderful man he was, passionate in his defence of what he considered to be right and equally fervent in his persecution of what he considered to be wrong. His sister contributed an excerpt from the last letter he wrote her, just before he got on the Titanic. One man wrote that Stead died just as he would have wanted to -- helping people (into lifeboats, in this case), with his boots on, and at the ideologically-appropriate midway point between Britain and America.
With the last, the gentleman was being a little free with the truth, as the Titanic sank significantly closer to North American shores than to her British moorings. But the sentiment is quite nice and blatant artistic licence is perhaps the most appropriate of all possible tributes to Stead, anyway.
In order to break things up a little, in between Stead eulogies,
mcee taught me how to play gin, which I had never learned to play before and which, it turns out, I enjoy a great deal. We proved to have two kinds of gin -- slow gin and sudden-death gin. We have no medium speed gin.